🚀 Warren Buffett Retires

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Market Overview
Read time 1.4 minutes

Year To Date Performances:

1. The first sunrise of 2026 marks the formal end of the most prolific era in modern finance as Warren Buffett officially transfers the Berkshire Hathaway CEO mantle to Greg Abel, concluding a six-decade masterclass in capital compounding that transformed a $19 textile husk into a $750,000-per-share global titan. While the legendary 5.5-million-percent cumulative return and a record $382 billion cash pile stand as an unmatched statistical fortress, the true transition lies in the newfound silence of the "Oracle"—a shift from Buffett’s definitive public guidance to Abel’s operational stewardship. As the market imposes a late-2025 "Succession Discount" and watches the departure of key investment lieutenant Todd Combs, Berkshire enters a new phase as a disciplined, institutionalized conglomerate, leaving its new leader to navigate a richly valued market that even Buffett, through 12 quarters of net selling, found too expensive to touch.

2. The silicon gold rush has hit a bipartisan firewall as 2026 begins, with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Ron DeSantis forming an unprecedented alliance to challenge the AI industry’s unbridled data center expansion. This political reckoning is fueled by a "massive wealth transfer" in the energy sector, where the $23 billion cost of securing power for hyperscalers is being passed directly to consumers, driving residential electricity rates up 5% in 2025 with another 4% hike forecast for 2026. With the PJM Interconnection—the nation's largest grid—projecting a catastrophic 6-gigawatt shortfall by 2027, the industry's "compute-at-all-costs" era has officially collided with a voter mandate for grid stability and price protection. Despite the Trump administration’s deregulation efforts, the emergence of local "AI Bills of Rights" and calls for a national construction moratorium suggest that the path to Artificial General Intelligence must now navigate a gauntlet of energy sovereignty and populist pocketbook politics.

3. In a defiant pivot toward internal-combustion muscle, Stellantis ushered in 2026 by resurrecting the Ram TRX, a $102,590 high-performance V-8 "halo" truck that serves as a 777-horsepower "Symbol of Protest" against the industry’s previous electrification mandates. This strategic reversal—driven by unretired CEO Tim Kuniskis—is enabled by a sweeping wave of federal deregulation under the Trump administration, which has effectively dismantled Biden-era fuel economy standards to prioritize conventional gas-powered profits over stalling EV demand. With U.S. sales having plummeted to a sixth-place market standing, the automaker is gambling on a return to "Hemi" heritage and a "Jeep Reset" that sacrifices promised battery-electric models for high-margin fossil-fuel powerplants, betting that an aggressive mix of raw performance and a new 10-year/100,000-mile warranty will be enough to conquer buyers in a flat 2026 market.

   Headlines

   1. 2025 was the best year for Google since 2009.

   2. Trump used the first veto of his second term to block bipartisan infrastructure projects.